Actions

Cyberattack hits major websites such as Amazon, Etsy, Twitter

Posted: 9:46 AM, Oct 21, 2016

Updated:2016-10-21 17:18:43Z

By:
Eric Pfahler

Amazon, Twitter, Etsy, Spotify and other major websites were slowed to a crawl in certain areas after a massive attack impacted the sites on the East Coast, according to DYN, a company that hosts Domain Name Servers.

A DDoS attack — an attack where hackers stifle meaningful data from coming through by glutting the server with useless data and repeated load requests — hit DYN on Friday morning, according to Business Insider
.

DYN said it had fixed
the issue shortly after 9:30 a.m. Eastern. However, the problem continued to plague DYN and the company warned of possible delays as the company works to fix the issue. Downdetector.com published a map showing where the outages were hitting. Click here
to see the outage map.

DYN hosts Domain Name Servers, which help computers translate browsers, according to Business Insider.

Hacker News reported the following sites were impacted.

DYN

Twitter

Etsy

Github

Soundcloud

Spotify

Heroku

Pagerduty

Shopify

Amazon

Copyright 2016 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.